Commentary on Political Economy

Thursday, 8 March 2012

Habermas on Marx: Epistemology, Social Theory, or Praxis?

Here then is how
Habermas recapitulates his “animadversion” on Marx in the second part of his
critical review of Marxian praxis, but note that already he has turned this praxis into “the critique of
epistemology”:

Marx
reduces the process of reflection to the level of instrumental action. By reducing the self-positing of the absolute ego to the
more tangible productive activity of the species, he eliminates reflection as
such as a motive force of history, even though he retains the framework of the
philosophy of reflection. His re-interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology
betrays the paradoxical consequences of taking Fichte's philosophy of the ego
and undermining it with materialism. Here the appropriating subject confronts
in the non-ego not just a product of the ego but rather some portion of the
contingency of nature. In this case the act of appropriation is no longer
identical with the reflective reintegration of some previously externalized
part of the subject itself. Marx preserves the relation of the subject's prior
positing activity (which was not transparent to itself), that is of
hypostatization, to the process of becoming conscious of what has been
objectified, that is of reflection. But, on the premises of a philosophy of
labor, this relation turns into the relation of production and appropriation,
of externalization and the appropriation of externalized essential powers. Marx conceives of reflection according to
the model of production. Because he tacitly starts with this premise, it is not
inconsistent that he does not distinguish between the logical status of the
natural sciences and of critique. (p.44)

Now, as we showed in
the first part of this review, it is emphatically not Marx who “reduces the
process of reflection to the level of
instrumental action” – in the first
place because Marx never properly
understood human living activity or living labor in terms of this dichotomy
that Habermas wishes to impose on it between the “instrumental” side of human
activity and its “conscious” or “reflective” side! There was unquestionably a scientistic and
reductive side to Marx’s work that takes us down to that most vulgar of his claims
– that of having “uncovered the laws of
motion of human history” or at any rate “the economic laws of motion of modern society” on which Habermas
predictably lays much emphasis. Yet, as even Habermas himself concedes, there
is much in Marx’s practical application
of his critique to specific historical events, and most notably his insistence
on the historical uniqueness of
capitalist social relations of production (in contrast to Political Economy),
that directly confutes Habermas’s claim of the Marxian “reduction” of
reflection to instrumental action and “disproportion” between his practice of
inquiry and his philosophical self-understanding of it.

Rather than carp on
the all-too-easily confutable scientism
of Marx’s analysis, Habermas ought to have asked himself why and how it is indeed possible
for Marx to be able simultaneously to
engage in the “vulgar” conception of “the laws of motion of human history” –
and indeed even to indulge the claim that human history could be subsumed
eventually under natural history (the infamous unification of science)! –
whilst still being able to conceive of the “critique” of political economy as a
form of revolutionary practice! The
reason why Habermas is unable to pose himself the question is the converse of the reason why Marx was
able to contradict his praxis: and
the reason is that Habermas is illegitimately dissecting human living activity
(the Arbeit or “labor”) into an
“instrumental” or “mechanical” or, if you like “techno-scientific” aspect, and into a “reflective” or
“conscious” or contemplative aspect: in short, he is accepting without hint of
a doubt – unreflexively indeed! – the
division of human labor into intellectual
and manual labor. (Intellectual and
Manual Labor is the title of the major theoretical work by Alfred
Sohn-Rethel in which he introduces also the notion of “social synthesis”. This
is a gallant effort from a genuinely devoted Marxist revolutionary thinker whom
we hold in high esteem. It is intriguing,
to say the least, that Habermas – though most probably aware of Sohn-Rethel’s
theses – fails to acknowledge or even to mention them in his work! Our own
divergence from the theses of this work will be the subject of a separate
review, but we are happy to adopt them provisionally
here.)

To say it again, when
Habermas claims that “Marx conceives of reflection according to the model of
production”, he is illicitly concluding that “production” is somehow
“un-reflexive” and “mechanical” – that, in other words, it is possible to
distinguish between a sphere of necessity,
of technical and scientific instrumental action (including that of “economic
science”?) and, in opposition to this, of a “reflexive” sphere of freedom or ideation that responds to symbolic
interaction. In effect, Habermas is reproducing uncritically the Cartesian schema of res cogitans (“mind”, “soul”, “spirit”) and res extensa (body, matter). Indeed, so pervicaciously ingrained is
this philosophical Cartesian-Kantian prejudice
in Habermas’s entire worldview, that he even has the effrontery to accuse Marx of
confusing “the logical status of the natural sciences and of critique” (!)
when it ought to be amply evident to him by now – if indeed he had read Marx
with an open mind – that no such distinction can be drawn between “the logical status of the natural sciences and of critique”!

Because he [Marx] tacitly starts with this premise, it is
not inconsistent that he does not distinguish between the logical status of the
natural sciences and of critique.

The
cardinal sin committed by Habermas here is first
to have articulated a purely fictitious and wholly phantomatic distinction
between “the logic of the natural sciences” and “the logic of critique” – when
he should know that there is no logic
to either the natural sciences or indeed to “critique” (!); and then, Habermas compounds his
temerary insolence by accusing Marx of
not distinguishing between these two utterly phantomatic entities!

Here Habermas
doubtless has in mind Marx’s famous statement in Capital about human beings as “species-conscious beings” – the Gattungswesen. And again we would have
to concede that in this regard as well Marx displays all the scientistic
prejudices, even bigotry, of the age of Darwin, to whom he intended to dedicate
Capital. Nevertheless, this does not
entitle Habermas to saddle Marx with a “framework” of philosophical analysis that
the bearded thinker time and again challenges
and even contra-dicts most notably in the Grundrisse. This is not the place to go into the merits of Marx’s
explicit and implicit outline of his philosophical framework, in the Grundrisse and elsewhere; nor have we
time and space to trace the historical correspondence between the division of social labor into its
“directive intellectual” and its “commanded manual” aspects. But we must take time
to delineate two facets of an implicit Marxian “critique of epistemology” based
on a reading of Marx’s work that
draws upon the Nietzschean critique of
Western “values” (scientific and ethico-political) – which, again, we
attribute to the political division
of human living activity into intellectual
labor on one side and manual labor
on the other.

Here is a splendid
example of Habermas’s inability to see that “science and technology” and “human
history” can be at one and the same time
subsumed under “social relations of production” and therefore (!) still be subsumed within a phylogenetic understanding
of human being as species-conscious being. If indeed, unlike Habermas, we are able to understand “science and technology”
as products of human social relations of production rather than as “autonomous,
objective” entities with a “neutral logical status”, then there is no reason
why the development of these social
relations of production in accordance with phylogenetically defined “human
interests” may clash and come into contra-diction with their actual asset under
capitalism! This is not a “logical” contradiction but what Marx would have
called a “dialectical” one – one that does not require a “transcendental”
understanding or theory of “knowledge” that
is separate from (that “transcends”) the actual social relations of
production (the satisfaction of human needs and goals) - which is precisely the
reason why Habermas champions Kant against Hegel! -, but rather an “immanent”
one that subsumes “science and technology” to those “social relations of
production”.

If we take as our basis the materialist concept of synthesis
through social labor, then both the
technically exploitable knowledge of the natural sciences, the knowledge of natural laws, as
well as the theory of society, the knowledge of laws of human natural history, belong to the same objective
context of the self-constitution of the species.

Simply breath-taking
is the mulish obstinacy with which Habermas harps on this opposition that exists only
in his mind and in his neo-Kantian mind alone (!) between “natural laws”
and “laws of human natural history” (whatever that means!). And immediately following this sentence, just take a
look at this pearl (!):

From
the level of pragmatic, everyday knowledge to modern natural science, the knowledge of nature derives from man's
primary coming to grips with nature; at the same time it reacts back upon the system of social labor and stimulates its
development.

The knowledge of society can be viewed analogously. Extending
from the level of the pragmatic self-understanding of social groups to actual
social theory, it defines the self-consciousness of societal subjects. Their
identity is reformed at each stage of development of the productive forces and
is in turn a condition for steering the process of production….

Thus, out of his own
creative imagination, Habermas has conjured
up a “division”, an “opposition”, a “contrast” between “the knowledge of
nature” and “the knowledge of society” which leads us back to the old
confabulations about “Subject and Object”, “Mind and Body”, “Spirit and
Nature”, and finally – but here is the real
immanent political contrast that matters to us: - capitalist and worker,
dead objectified labor commanding
living labor. In vain, Habermas invokes the
Marx of the Grundrisse to enlist him
in this neo-Kantian folly:

The development of fixed capital indicates
the extent to which general social knowledge has become an immediate force of
production, and therefore [!] the conditions of the social life process itself
have come under the control of the general intellect.7

So far as production establishes the only framework in which
the genesis and function of knowledge can be interpreted, the science of man
also appears under categories of knowledge for control (Verfügungswissen). At
the level of the self-consciousness of social subjects, knowledge that makes
possible the control of natural processes turns into knowledge that makes
possible the control of the social life process. In the dimension of labor as a
process of production and appropriation, reflective knowledge
(Reflexionswissen) changes into productive knowledge (Produktionswissen).
Natural knowledge congealed in technologies impels the social subject to an
ever more thorough knowledge of its "process of material exchange"
with nature. In the end this knowledge is transformed into the steering of
social processes in a manner not unlike that in which natural science becomes
the power of technical control. (p.47)

Marx himself, in the
quotation Habermas adopts above, commits the very vulgar error – one that
Habermas, entirely innocent of
economic knowledge, fails to detect – of confusing what he will later (in Capital) call “constant capital” with
“fixed capital” (plant and equipment – roughly put, “technology”). But this
does not entitle Habermas to conclude that by “fixed capital” Marx means “mere instrumental technology” or
“knowledge for control” (my God! Where does he get these notions from?) or
“Verfugungswissen” which can then be combined with “reflective knowledge” to
yield finally – in a transmutation worthy of the maddest mediaeval alchemist – a magical “productive
knowledge” or “Produktionswissen” (I give up!) that, according to Habermas,
Marx does not “self-understand philosophically”!

At this stage of
arcane nonsense we would be quite entitled to throw the whole physical weight
of the book Knowledge and Human Interests
at Habermas himself were it not for the fact that we owe him the stimulus of
his comprehensive obtuse asininity - and, let us admit it, a great deal of
intellect in the mix, for which we thank him! Again and again, Habermas goes on
(as if repetition could somehow dispel his confusion)
to cavil at this “dualism” of “labor” (Arbeit) as mere “instrumental action” (manual labor?) and “labor” as
“reflection” or “interaction” (intellectual
labor?):

Here it is from the methodological perspective that we are
interested in this conception of the transformation of the labor process into a
scientific process that would bring man's "material exchange" with
nature under the control of a human species totally emancipated from necessary
labor. A science of man developed from this point of view would have to
construct the history of the species as a synthesis through social labor-- and only through labor. It would make
true the fiction of the early Marx that natural science subsumes the science
of man just as much as the latter subsumes the former. For, on the one
hand, the scientization of production is seen as the movement that brings about
the identity of a subject that knows the social life process and then also
steers it. In this sense the science of man would be subsumed under natural
science. On the other hand, the natural sciences are comprehended in virtue of
their function in the self- generative process of the species as the exoteric
disclosure of man's essential powers. In this sense, natural science would be
subsumed under the science of man. The latter contains principles from which a
methodology of the natural sciences resembling a transcendental-logically
determined pragmatism could be derived. But this science does not question its
own epistemological foundations. It understands itself in analogy to the
natural sciences as productive knowledge. It thus conceals the dimension of
self-reflection in which it must move regardless.

Now the argument which we have taken up was not pursued
beyond the stage of the "rough sketch" ("Rohentwurf") of
Capital. It is typical only of the philosophical foundation of

-- 51 --

Marx's critique of Hegel, that is production as the
"activity" of a self-constituting species. It is not typical of the
actual social theory in which Marx materialistically appropriates Hegel on a
broad scale. Even in the Grundrisse we
find already the official view that the transformation of science into
machinery does not by any means lead of itself to the liberation of a
self-conscious general subject that masters the process of production.
According to this other version the self-constitution of the species takes
place not only in the context of men's
instrumental action upon nature but simultaneously in the dimension of power relations that regulate men's
interaction among themselves.

This is complete and
utter nonsense – because nowhere in the Grundrisse
(the “Roh-entwurf”) will we find Marx indulging in the kind of academic
hair-splitting exercises on which Habermas built his academic career between
“labor” as “instrumental action upon nature” and “labor” as “interaction
between human beings” – least of all would Marx have countenanced the
“simultaneous” occurrence of these two “fictions” of Habermas’s own making. And
that is because Marx knew all too well that acquiescing in such a dualism or dichotomy between “instrumental action” on one side and
“interaction” on the other would have landed him straight into the Comtean positivism – indeed the “nihilism”, as
Nietzsche so ably unmasked it in Gaya Scienza and in the Genealogie – for the very simple reason that once we admit that human living activity is
subject to “the laws of nature”, then it follows just as “scientifically” that
the “interaction between human
beings” also is subject to these
“laws of nature” (or “technology”) – which is exactly what every Positivism from Comte onwards has tried to
establish!

So this turns into
complete and utter nonsense Habermas’s absurd claim that Marx was somehow
responsible for the intellectual emergence of Comtean positivism (yes, I know,
it is hard to believe, but this is exactly what Habermas does!) as Habermas
almost insanely, but assuredly inanely,
suggests!

Marx
did not develop this idea of the science of man. By equating critique with
natural science, he disavowed it.
Materialist scientism only reconfirms what absolute idealism had already
accomplished: the elimination of epistemology in favor of unchained universal
"scientific knowledge"--but this time of scientific materialism
instead of absolute knowledge.

With his positivist demand for a natural science of the
social, Comte merely needed to take Marx, or at least the intention that Marx
believed himself to be pursuing, at his word. Positivism turned its back to the
theory of knowledge, whose philosophical self-liquidation had been carried on
by Hegel and Marx, who were of one mind in this regard. In so doing, positivism
regressed behind the level of reflection once attained by Kant. In continuity
with pre-critical traditions, however, it successfully set about the task,
which epistemology had abandoned and from which Hegel and Marx believed
themselves exempted, of elaborating a methodology of the sciences.

Wrong! It is Habermas’s attempt to rescue “natural
science” from the practical critique of
Marxian theory that delivers Habermas straight into the paws and maws and
jaws of Positivism – which he himself confirms when he foolishly and
absurdly concedes with the last words
of his essay that positivism

successfully set about the task, which epistemology had
abandoned and from which Hegel and Marx believed themselves exempted, of
elaborating a methodology of the sciences. (p.63)

“Successfully”?
Really? Yet to the degree that positivist
methodology is “successful”, it is so not
because it is “scientific” but rather because its strategy of domination on behalf of capital against living labor is
effectual! Habermas again
confuses “what is” with “what succeeds”, which is the very opposite of what the
task of “critique” and “reflection” is supposed to do! Perhaps the singular
source of Habermas’s confusion is the fact that he wishes to outline, if not
even to spell out, a “positive science” that, as the English title to this
chapter suggests, will serve both as “theory of knowledge” and as “social
theory”. So distant is Habermas from comprehending the most basic outline of
the Marxian critique of political economy that he confuses Marx’s
identification of the social antagonism intrinsic
to the technological means and mode of production adopted by capitalists to
subjugate living labor and reduce it to abstract labor with a simple
squabble between “social classes” over “the distribution of the surplus product
created by labor”. By “labor”! So vulgar is Habermas’s reading of Marx that he
cannot even distinguish between “living labor” and “labor power”, so that the
entire problem with capitalism boils down for him to one about “the
distribution of surplus product” over and
above what Marx unhappily called “necessary labor” – another fable
attributable to his pervasive scientism!

If production attains the level of producing goods over and above elementary needs, the
problem arises of distributing the surplus product created by labor. This
problem is solved by the formation of social classes, which participate to
varying degrees in the burdens of production and in social rewards. With the
cleavage of the social system into classes that are made permanent by the
institutional framework, the social subject loses its unity: "To regard
society as one single subject is, moreover, to regard it
falsely--speculatively."15

As long as we regard the self-constitution of the species
through labor only with respect to the power of control over natural processes
that accumulates in the forces of production, it is meaningful to speak of the
social system in general and to speak of the social subject in the singular.
For the level of development of the forces of production determines the system
of social labor as a whole. In principle the members of a society all live at
the same level of mastery of nature, which in each case is given with the
available technical knowledge. So far as the identity of a society takes form via
this level of scientific-technical progress, it is the self-consciousness of
"the" social subject. But as we now see, the self-formative process
of the species does not coincide with the genesis of this subject of
scientific-technical progress. Rather, this "self-generative act,"
which Marx comprehended as a materialistic activity, is accompanied by a
self-formative process mediated by the interaction of class subjects either
under compulsory integration or in open rivalry. (p.54)

Habermas’s difficulty is
that he conceives of “the process of production” as a “scientifically and
technically neutral process” – one
that responds to “natural laws”. As a result, Habermas then needs to add to this process as an adjunct or appendage a “social theory”
that can explain why and how, given that
the process of production is scientifically and technologically “neutral”
(!), there can ever arise any “social divisions” in “society” over the
“distribution of the product” between “social classes”! What Habermas neglects
entirely is that “science and technology” are never “neutral” but rather are tools,
instruments and strategies of capitalist domination over living labor. The
aim of our revolutionary movement can never be that of developing a “neutral
science”. Rather, it is that of creating a democratic society!